Empowerment and restraint in scientific communication

These are great times to be a scientist. Never before has communication and access to information been so easy, at a time when the amount of scientific information itself is increasing exponentially. Many new technologies allow people to receive and send information and opinions in ways that are readily accessible to anybody with a shared interest. Together, these developments have empowered scientists—but not only scientists—to rise above the information deluge. However, there are also increasing concerns about the risks in making public biological information that is potentially useful for destructive purposes, either by individuals or states. These concerns, expressed mainly by politicians and security experts, have raised the prospect of restraining publication of sensitive results. This article focuses on such restraints in the context of the opportunities. Several new software developments now provide online empowerment. RSS feeds allow the user to customize alerts to new content on websites, while social bookmarking software, such as Connotea and del.icio.us, enable people, privately or openly, to share links to websites they find interesting and valuable. The combination of these technologies can greatly reduce the obstacles to finding relevant new information quickly, even if the user did not know it existed. Interactive weblogs give more power to both the author and the reader. Whether openly or secretly, weblogs and e-mails allow researchers to bypass standard channels of communication to reach out directly to any audience they want—as practised, for example, by US climate researchers who want to speak about their science in an often hostile environment (www.realclimate.org). Perhaps the most significant empowerment will come with the Semantic Web, a set of new standards and protocols devised by Tim Berners-Lee, which will in effect ally human web users to computers and artificial intelligence.